These carvings, made by grinding or pecking stone against stone, are among the oldest forms of human expression found in Ireland, their precise meaning long debated and never settled. What is certain is that somebody, at some point in prehistory, chose this particular rock and worked at it deliberately. That rock has not been seen for well over a century.

The record of its existence comes from Kinahan, writing between 1879 and 1888, who noted the marked stone lying just south of three hut-sites on the hillside, its location plotted on a field map produced by the Geological Survey of Ireland. The proximity of the cup-marked rock to those hut-sites is suggestive, though what relationship, if any, existed between the two features remains unknown. Since Kinahan's time, the area has been planted over with forestry, and neither the rock art nor the hut-sites are now visible. The trees have, in effect, buried the record in a second layer of obscurity, beyond the first already imposed by time.

There is little a visitor could usefully look for today. The forest cover that has swallowed the slope gives no indication of what lies beneath or within it, and without Kinahan's original field map there is no precise location to work from. The site is less a place to visit than a reminder that the archaeological record is always incomplete, and that some things documented in the nineteenth century have simply, quietly, disappeared.